Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [16]
As I mastered the art of bike riding via echolocation, I ventured farther afield in Palmdale, a town of about two thousand. I can still conjure up a map of our part of town. At the center of the grid in my mind is our house at 38710 Stanridge Avenue. Our house was between Third Street and Glenraven Street. Between the streets ran the avenues, each named with a letter of the alphabet, along with a number. The avenues were one mile apart. Our house was between Avenue Q and Avenue Q3, although it was closer to Q. So we were between Q and Q3 on the north and south, and between Third and Glenraven on the east and west.
Although I mastered riding the streets, I came home more than once to find one of my parents on the phone, hearing yet again about their blind child out riding unaccompanied around the neighborhood. The calls always ended with the neighbors hanging up in frustration. My parents never gave in, and eventually neighbors got used to the blind kid riding his bike and the lack of outrage expressed by my parents and finally stopped calling.
I spring from stubborn and self-reliant stock. I also can only hope that my parents’ persistence served to educate my neighbors a little about what blind people can do. My father’s can-do attitude was a huge influence on me. His name was George Hingson, and he was born in 1914 in Dewey, Oklahoma. A quiet man with a grade school education, he left home when he was just twelve or thirteen years old. I’m not sure why. To support himself, he went to work herding sheep on the Idaho-Montana border in the Bitterroot Mountains, a subrange of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a beautiful, pristine wilderness with rugged peaks and steep canyons carved by glaciers, but not an easy place for a young boy to live outdoors for months at a time without home or family. Big game flourishes in the area, which means predators are about, so my father’s job was to protect his flock of sheep from wolves, bobcats, and mountain lions. He used to tell us a story about accidentally cutting off his thumb with an ax then burying it in the snow for three days until he was able to get somewhere where doctors could surgically reattach it. I never saw much of a scar, but he couldn’t bend his thumb at the first joint. So even my dad, the tough guy who always defended me, had accidents too.
Later, Dad worked as a cowboy, ending up in Washington State. He finally realized he didn’t want to chase cattle the rest of his life, so in his midtwenties he enlisted in the army. He served in the Third Infantry Division, which deployed to North Africa, Italy, Sicily, and Southern France during World War II. He was part of the Signal Corps, a branch of the service responsible for all military information and communications systems. Some of the Signal Regiment’s accomplishments during World War II included developing radar and FM radio for military use. The Signal Corps also developed the first FM backpack radio, allowing front-line troops to communicate reliably and static free, thanks to frequency modulation circuits. His military training in electronics would come in very handy back in the United States.
While serving overseas, my dad became friends with a man named Sam Keith. Sam’s wife, Ruthie, wrote letters to her husband and often included pictures of friends and family. One day, George happened to see a photograph of Ruthie’s sister, Sarah. She was a slight woman, blonde and pretty. He was smitten and asked Sam if it would be okay for him to write to Sarah. Sam agreed, and a wartime romance flourished in a flurry of red-and-blue–striped Air Mail envelopes.
Sarah Stone was not your average girl. A street-smart and independent woman, she originally hailed from New York City. She was a high school graduate, she loved to read, and she earned a beautician’s license and supported herself at a time when not many women did. She had lived and worked in both New York and California, finally ending up in Chicago. Sarah and George hit it off, and when the war was over, George